Dried Beans and Corn as Survival Protein

If you are stocking up on food for a shelter or just in general one of the best foods to have on hand are dried beans and pulses.  Of course you also need a clean water source to soak and cook the dried beans in as well. This is a cheap way to stock the shelves of a shelter too because you can get a pound of beans, or pulses (like lentils) for less than a dollar bag in most places. This means that you can fill up tubs and tubs with this healthy and filling food and stay alive for a long time.

 

There is a reason hat beans were once called “poor man’s meat”. They are so nutritious you can live on just beans a lone for a very long time.  They are also delicious when mixed with spices.

 

Beans, contain all the essential amino acids but one (methionine) . . . which just happens to be the amino acid that corn does have.  Once you mix dried beans with dried corn you have a complete protein. In fact if you want a mixture that is equal to the nutrition of one glass of milk then you should eat two parts corn and one part bands.  A bit of wheat germ adds omega acids that are essential for the assimilation of protein as well.

Both dried beans and corn can be kept for a very long time with no loss flavor or nutrition which is why they are great survivalist foods.  The reason these foods are dried is because bulk that weights 100 pounds can be reduced to ten pounds.  Beans and corn can also be dried in the most primitive ways.  The beans can be spread out over a fire in a pan or dried in the sun.  Beans and corn are completely dried when they no longer stick to each other or to your hands.

 

Before corn is dried it is blanched first by plunging it into boiling water for a few moments.  This helps preserve the taste and keeps it drier for longer.

 

Many survivalists store their dried corn and beans in clean wax milk cartons. This is a good way to recycle and the wax coating helps keep the goods free from food moths and bugs.

 

You can also make different soup and meal mixes by combining different types of beans, pulses and rice together and storing them.

Survival

Famous Fall Out Shelters From Books, TV and Movies

The fallout shelter, which is primarily an icon from 1950s (the Atomic Age) was used to protect people from the radiation expelled from a nuclear explosion.  One of the first literary mentions of a fallout shelter was in Farmham’s Freehold by American Author Robert Heinlen who built a fairly extensive shelter for himself in the Colorado desert.  The book, published in 1984 followed the adventures of a family living in a shelter and detailed very specificially the details of building one.

 

Rod Serling once presented a very famous Twilight Zone episode  that featured one man building a fall out shelter.  His neighbors make fun of him but when the big one hits they all want in the shelter and there is not quite enough room.  The cartoon series “The Simpson’s” also did a parody of this Twilight Zone episode from the sixties.  This episode was called Bart’s Comet and featured a comet hurling towards earth. Ned Flanders builds a shelter and lets everyone in, with the end result that he must leave the shelter so that others may live.

 

In  A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-apolalyptic science fiction novel by Walter M. Miller, Jr. published in 1960 survivors hid in a Catholic desert in a California monastery and form a cult of monks devoted to preserving the surviving pieces of man’s history and knowledge.

 

In 1984 a very scary docudrama called Threads – Nuclear War depicts what happens after people retreat to a bomb shelter and then emerge back into the world later.  It depicts people dying, mutating and banging old canned goods with rocks to open them so they can eat food.

 

One very odd film but very popular film about fallout shelters was Blast From the Past. This was a romantic comedy about a nuclear scientist and his wife and son who enter their shelter curing the 1962 missile crisis and do not emerge until 1997.

 

For the past six years gamers have been playing the Fallout series of computer games that depict civilization living in underground vaults to protect itself against an atomic blast.

 

Bomb shelters have also been featured prominently in literature. In the book Metro 2033 by Russian writer Dmitry Glukhovsky, survivors of a nuclear blast make do in shelters made from underground subway systems in Saint-Petersberg and Moscow.

 

In the 2006 movie The Road (based on a book by Cormac McCarthey, survivors of a nuclear cataclysm end up finding food to survive in an abandoned bomb shelter; even if you do not survive a nuclear blast it is always a good idea to keep the larders of the shelter well-stocked for starving survivors who may stumble upon your stash!

Survival
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